Hello,
I'm hoping someone may have an idea about this, as it seems to me an odd problem. I have a Compaq F572US laptop with built-in Broadcom wireless. The wireless connection has been working great for the last several weeks. I got it working initially with the Dangermouse script which used b43-fwcutter I believe. I'm running a dual-boot system, with Fedora Core 8 (2.6.24.3-50 32-bit kernel) on one partition and Winxp on the other partition. I haven't installed any updates in the last few days. Last night wireless was working great on Fedora. This morning I went to boot up my laptop and the wireless card did not show up at all. Network Manager showed only the wired connection. I ran lspci and the Wireless card did not show up in that list either. I checked to make sure the switch on the front of the laptop for the wireless card was switched on, and it was. I booted into my WinXP partition and Windows sees the wireless card just fine. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could have caused this or anything I could do to fix it? I'm hoping I don't have to reinstall from scratch, although if it comes down to it, that's what I'll do. If the output of any other commands would be helpful, I'll be happy to post it.
Thanks!
Michael

Update: Shortly after I posted this, I booted back into my WinXP install, which then didn't see the wireless card either. Spent the last while on the phone with HP, as it's starting to look like a hardware problem. Flashed the BIOS and the wireless connection showed up (in Windows) for a minute, then when the HP tech had me try to update the driver as well, the device didn't come back up. Unfortunately, HP won't help me until I put the OS that it shipped with (Vista) back on the laptop, so I'm off to backup my data and reinstall that from the recovery cd's..just to get them to take a further look at it.
While part of me sees where they're coming from...the other part is getting a headache at the prospect of having to redo everything I've got working so far with Fedora. I guess the upside is that now that I've gotten things working great once, it shouldn't be as hard the second time.